Authors:
Alan Ali
;
Gaetan Garcia
and
Philippe Martinet
Affiliation:
Ecole Central de Nantes, France
Keyword(s):
Platoon, Control, Time Headway, Constant Spacing, String Stability, Inter-vehicle Distance, Highways.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics
;
Intelligent Transportation Technologies and Systems
;
Mobile Robots and Autonomous Systems
;
Robotics and Automation
;
Vehicle Control Applications
Abstract:
Heavy traffic on highways requires the optimization of inter-distances between vehicles in order to reach
time performance and to provide safety solution in transport. Variable spacing and constant spacing are the
two policies for the longitudinal control of platoon. Variable spacing doesn’t require a lot of data (position,
speed...) from other vehicles, and string stability using only on-board information is obtained. However, intervehicle
distances are very large, and hence traffic density is low. Constant spacing can offer string stability with
high traffic density, but it requires at least data from the leader. In this paper, a novel expression of the variable
spacing policy has been proposed. It is effective to decrease the distance between the cars, to become nearly
equal to the constant spacing policy. It also enables increasing the string stability and the robustness of the
control regarding to unmodeled lags, and it can avoid control torque saturation. This novel approach do
esn’t
require heavy communication between the cars. The new control law has been evaluated by simulation with
perfect system using Matlab, and with imperfect system using TORCS. The good results have demonstrated
the effectiveness of the novel approach.
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